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"Seeing recognition spill out across regions and teams is a strong indication that we're building a unified culture and breaking out of our initial post-merger silos."
The challenge
Integris was created in 2021 by the merger of 12 highly successful IT providers across the United States.
The CEO of Integris asked Bill McCharen to be Integris' first Chief People Officer in part because of the company culture Bill developed at MyITpros, one of the 12 companies that merged to become Integris. Bill had been at MyITpros for 18 years, first as an employee and eventually as primary owner and CEO.
Bill accepted the position on the condition that he could implement his preferred HR tech stack to guide the culture of this new organization.
"Merging systems and processes during an acquisition is challenging," Bill says, "but merging cultures and eliminating natural silos is an even greater challenge."
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The solution
One of the key tools in Bill's HR tech stack was Bonusly, the employee recognition and rewards software his company had used for years: "Bonusly had been such a critical system to build our culture at MyITpros—and maintain that culture in a remote environment—I knew we would need it to create a new company culture," Bill says.
"We were bringing together 12 highly successful companies, and everyone thought they had the secret sauce," says Bill. "Of those 12 companies, a handful had already used Bonusly and loved it, so there was some natural momentum behind Integris's Bonusly adoption."
"One of the unexpected benefits of Bonusly is how it identifies the real rock stars within the company. It's like the People's Choice Awards, seeing the company through the lens of employees."
Rolling Bonusly out to all of Integris's ~600 employees, Bill and his team focused less on training ("Bonusly is intuitive," Bill says) and more on what Bonusly could do for Integris as a new company. Integris's HR team collected testimonials from folks who had used Bonusly before and could attest to its benefits.
In the four months since launching Bonusly, Bill says that he's noticed more cross-departmental, cross-regional recognition: "People from Austin, Denver, St. Paul, and Atlanta have more visibility into everyone's activities and they're giving kudos to one another."
"I've also seen recognition move horizontally between peers across the organization, not just up and down between managers and their reports. Seeing recognition spill out across regions and teams is a strong indication that we're building a unified culture and breaking out of our initial post-merger silos."
The bottom line
"Bonusly allows me to give everyone at Integris a voice, the opportunity to thank someone else, and be recognized for the work they do. That's powerful data to have, and it offers a very visible, public way to see the company's progress on unification."
